


heather, hawthorn, and steel

by haloud



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mythology, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-16
Updated: 2020-04-30
Packaged: 2020-10-19 16:10:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20660021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/haloud/pseuds/haloud
Summary: The altar is draped in deep crimson, adorned with gold and iron, sword lilies and heather. Priests and priestesses keep his temple, light the candles, sweep the floors, but Michael only ever meets the god when he comes praying, bare but for his hawthorn crown.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this fic is not for redistribution without express permission.

Michael approaches the altar with his feet bare, his heart in his throat, and with bare steel in his hand. He makes no offering, no obeisance before he comes. The god is always waiting for him, and the sacrifice, they understand, will always be coming later.

The altar is draped in deep crimson, adorned with gold and iron, sword lilies and heather. Priests and priestesses keep his temple, light the candles, sweep the floors, but Michael only ever meets the god when he comes praying, bare but for his hawthorn crown.

When Michael came here as an orphan, cast out, beaten, and defeated, he fell upon his knees. The god liked that, Michael thinks, or at least he liked the bruises. He reached out with berry-stained fingertips. His touch burned and blistered, and Michael let himself be purified, and then he stood before the god made trembling and new, and pledged his life away.

Today, he approaches on his feet, and Michael likes to think, when he sees those eyes too black to be pierced even by his very own fires, that the god is fond of that too.

“The deed is done,” Michael says, and makes no attempt to keep the tremor from his voice. Even if he tried, the god would know, and the god gorges himself on secrets. It is better to treat with him with crystal honesty, whatever humiliations he must endure.

The god smiles and tilts his head, his coal eyes scan from the crown of Michael’s head, to the dirt smeared on his jaw, down the leonine line of his body, to his feet where the floor begins to heat beneath him. Michael submits himself willingly to this dissection, and he observes in turn. Today, however, he has come not only to bask in the god’s presence, but seeking the completion of a very old oath between them.

Michael looks upon a god and says, “It surprises me that you are here, when you must know what I come asking.”

It is his god’s custom, and always has been, to disappear to his higher throne whenever Michael seeks him with some human concern or desire. Once, this pained him; still, he does not understand how the god can be in turns so fierce and so very tender, and then turn cold and distant as a northern wind.

The god knows—he must—that Michael will always return, no matter what he finds when he reaches the inner sanctum—divinity, or hollow, grieving stone.

“Surprise? Have I been so inconstant? Supposing I have, it was only for desire to make precious metals of your hair, gemstones of your eyes. If I free you from our covenant before you are immortalized, you will be all too vulnerable to those who wish to harm me. These things take time.”

“Gold and gemstones can buy me nothing I desire. I have killed a servant of your enemy, and now I come to ask for my reward. You promised me a kiss. I never asked for your protection; I wished only to do your bidding, and to be rewarded in my turn.”

“I have many enemies, each one more difficult to be reached without mortal assistance. What if I kiss you and you leave my service, satisfied? I would have to find myself another champion, and the very thought is a horror to me.” The god licks his lips and leans forward, into the firelight. “What if I cannot help myself, and your fire is swallowed up within me? However, then, would I go on?”

Michael plants his feet and raises up his voice, begging to be heard despite his feeble, human speech. “Are all the gods so fickle? Would that I loved a god of stone, that I might be burned less by the air and fire.”

“A god of stone would bore you terribly and would find you far too easily crushed. You are my creature, Michael Guerin. You’d be best served not to forget.”

“How could I? When you haunt every waking hour and make the night too bright for sleep?”

“And here you claim I have not yet surrendered the kiss you are due. Is not every candle wick my kiss, every spark thrown by your fire? Was it not me, your patron, who gave of his very essence and forged that sword you wield?”

“I have had my fill of swords in my bed and candle wick kisses. Won’t you give me a kiss from your lips instead? Please. My lord. Alexander.”

That human name was his first boon. He asked a gift of his god and paid in winter, in three long cold silent seasons, until he lit a fire in the spring, and it whispered _Alexander_.

He speaks the name now, aloud, from his wet red human throat, and it makes the candles dance.

“Very well,” the god exhales, sliding his body from the altar, long-limbed and lithe and golden in the firelight. He fills the room with the heat of the forge, with the smell of earth baked by the sun. He fills the room with his presence entire—but when he stands before Michael, he is only the size of a man.

The god holds out a shimmering dagger, and folds Michael’s hand around the hilt. Their fingers touch around the burning, raw iron, but Michael can feel nothing but a whisper of air against his skin.

It is never easy, the sacrifice; it is never painless. There are gods who demand a gift of life; there are gods who demand a gift of food, or crafts, or music. Michael’s god asks the purest offering—he asks for the only thing Michael always has to give.

Michael has opened up his palms for his god again and again; he has come to the altar with wounds unbandaged and offered himself freely. He would do so again. He would do so again. He once came to worship and found his god pale and flickering, and he opened up his throat.

Today, while the god watches with his lips parted and his pulse, too slow and strong to be human, throbbing in his throat, Michael lifts the hem of his tunic and lays the knife against his thigh.

Legs shaking, sticky from the blood, he is borne back by waves of heat, until he falls back against the altar. His eyes fall shut, and red flares against his lids, and he waits with saliva in his mouth to be reduced to exultant, supplicant ash.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> every single time i think 'this is the most self-indulgent thing i've ever written' it is a very filthy lie, because i can always indulge myself further
> 
> discord @ haloud  
tumblr @ cosmicsolipsism


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this fic is not for redistribution without my express permission

They are lying in the dry summer grass. Brown and brittle, it pricks at Michael’s bare skin like needles, but the heat of the sun strokes him like the hands of the god before he’s blooded. This is his favorite season.

“Have there been others, like me? Are there others, right now?” He asks, expecting no answer. The god has lived for so long, and is gone so often. If there are no others, Michael knows even less than he imagined about the gods.

“Does it matter?” Alexander responds. “When you extinguish one fire and move on in your journey, the next night’s fire is no colder in the slightest. An army may march at night, a thousand torches lit from a single source, and each man’s own would penetrate the darkness just the same. Do not imagine that my patronage of you is divided in any other terms.”

“My thanks.” He does not voice the reason for his question: _I wish to know more of you. _The god’s past would take years in the telling. Seasons would pass; Michael would sicken and die before he heard that smooth voice speak of their first meeting.

Yet it is easy lying by his side to imagine being always young, and to imagine that the world could be always summer, and Michael wants to know.

A waft of blistering bellows-air brushes his thigh, and Michael glances down. The god’s golden hand rests upon him, right where his sword would hang before a battle.

“I have forged many a weapon; those weapons have been put to many a purpose. I could no more recount them all than a river god could recount all the fish she has ferried to spawn.”

The god’s touch blazes a trail of sensation from the top of Michael’s thigh to the bend of his knee. The skin there is thin, the blood flowing near the surface. Michael parts his legs willingly, hoping for that touch to continue.

“Never has a one of my swords been returned to me, and I have never once given it thought.”

Michael’s sword lies several feet away. He discarded it with his clothes when the god appeared and followed him up the hillside to this secluded hollow. It is never far from him, for the god told him it was created of his very essence, and to discard it would be discarding Alexander himself.

“You said…”

The god smiles. “I know.” And he removes his hand, rolling onto his back to gaze up at the blindingly blue sky. “There are others,” he slides his coal-black eyes sideways to regard Michael once more, “And then there is you.”

It is more, far more, of an answer than Michael expected when he asked his foolish question. But still it is not enough. His tongue swipes over his cracked lower lip, soothing the sting. He asks, “If there are others, though, what need have you for me? What can I do for you that another cannot?”

What use am I? How long before I am discarded? Who shall be the one to take my place? These are other questions he wishes to ask, plaintive and pitiful like an abandoned child, but he bites down on his tongue, afraid enough already that the god has turned away, and that he is talking only to the wind, and hoping the wind is one of his.

“What need have you for me?” The god returns. “You have strength enough for fighting mortal men. My strength added to yours is only needed for fighting my own enemies, whom I cannot touch with my own hands. Your only need is of my own creation. Those long years ago, if you had sheltered anywhere but in my sight, your life would be as full. And more peaceful, besides.”

“No!” Michael leaps to his feet. Heart in his throat, he cries, “You are more than a patron to me, more than a commander. You must know this. I have made no attempts to hide it—that all I do is for love of you.”

Alexander closes his eyes. The sun is so bright, and he is so lit from within, that Michael can see the thin blue tracery of veins on his eyelids. Michael does not know the true form of the gods, but Alexander is so exquisite in the form of a man that in truth he needs now other.

Still, he smiles that vague and gentle smile, an expression so ancient it would not belong on the lips of any mortal. He has always smiled this way, even when they first met, and Alexander took the form of a soft-cheeked youth rather than the broad-shouldered and long-limbed man he appears as now.

“Has it occurred to you that that love is also my doing? That I have kept you beholden to me for reasons of my own, toyed with you for my own amusement? You have expressed displeasure with my ways in the past; have I changed to suit you, as a lover would?”

“I,” Michael swallows, and it is painful, the motion of his Adam’s apple like a knife against the softest part of him, “I do not know if you—if gods love as men do. But I have come to know you, I believe, as much as a man can, and you are not cruel. You would not be that cruel. To me.”

“And there you have your answer. It is the most rare and precious gift to have no need for cruelty.”

Michael stands still, curling his toes in the stiff grass, in the dry, soft dirt. The hot midday breeze ruffles the hairs of his skin, tugs playfully at the ends of his hair. Alexander’s eyes open and find him silhouetted against the sun. The pain of gazing upon him should be unbearable, as piercing and terrible as it is to look at the god himself full on. The light turns his coal-dark eyes to brightest amber. He does not look away.

“Lay with me a while longer,” the god commands, and Michael does.


	3. Chapter 3

The midday light is blinding on the white marble, and Michael shields his eyes as he approaches the temple. Still, the stone is cool and smooth beneath his dusty bare feet as he ascends the steps with coltish eagerness, for he awoke with his blood singing in the dawn and ran all the way from the city just to be here to watch his god hold court.

Beneath the shadow of the temple, Michael blinks to let his watering eyes adjust. The exterior reflects and worships the sun as befitting its icon, but inside it is cool and shaded. Michael expected a crowd, for it is so rarely that Alexander makes himself known here at the temple, but there is no one inside. Before him is the altar, a gaudy but generous replication of the shrine beneath the earth where Michael goes to be pledged and pledged anew. And past the altar is a dais, and upon the dais is a curtained pavilion, piled high with cloth and pillows and lit from within by the glowing body of the god.

Michael trips lightly toward him, drawn as a moth to a flame, and Alexander looks up at the whisper of his feet upon the ground, and he smiles and reaches for him with a knife already in his hand.

“Prick your finger so I may feel you for a while,” he demands, and Michael does. Though he was not told which finger, so he does three on his left hand before the knife is snatched away from him, and the god is frowning as he examines Michael’s wound with sharp eyes.

There was a time he would have cowered from the possibility of displeasure, but now he only smiles in content, besotted rebellion. Alex knows one drop of blood would never be enough for them. And anyway he has grown in power lately, and he can restore Michael back to health with ease. It is Michael’s favorite thing to know that he is the reason for such power. Proud he may be, but does he not have reason?

Michael crawls onto the dais, and Alex sucks the blood from his fingertips before he pulls Michael’s head to his thigh. Pillowed on that firm muscle, Michael smiles, held like a lover and drunk on it.

“It has been weeks since you sent me away.” Michael wraps his fingers gently around the god’s ankle, thumb resting over the thick heel. “On a task for you,” he corrects himself, lest Alex thinks he resents the time apart, the service he provides.

Alex is silent for a moment, combing through Michael’s curls, winding each around a finger, pressing his thumbnail to the grain to pick out each fleck of gold among the brown.

“I have not had the need,” he murmurs, waving his other hand lazily. “Would you let me put the sunlight in your hair?”

“Will it burn me?”

“Perhaps. You are lovely when you burn.”

“You would not hurt me.”

“Is that what you truly believe?”

“You are very powerful and could do so if you pleased. But there are other ways I please you far more. Is it not so?”

“Who blessed you with such an impudent tongue? It was not I.”

“Oh, it was, for no other god has touched it. Perhaps instead it is a curse, which you should apply yourself to remove…”

“Impudent _and _too clever.” Yet still the god lays kisses on Michael’s face, and blesses his tongue when he opens his mouth to receive it. The god leaves his lips chapped and bruising, and he tastes like summer rain.

“Who would dare to try and curse me?” Michael asks when they are parted. “I would tell them I am yours, and they would flee for fear of your might.”

At that, Alex frowns, and Michael frowns. Did he say something wrong? In the past the god has been hesitant to reveal his patronage for fear Michael would catch the ire of his enemies, but those days are passed. Anyway, he was only mostly joking.

“Have I…” the god says slowly, fitting his fingers oh-so-carefully to Michael’s shoulder, over the five fingers of an old and shining scar, “Not allowed you proper space to remain your own? I confess it is an instinct to make you a possession, cherished, hoarded. But I love you most because we are the same creature. Air and fire cannot be kept. No matter what else I have said, I did not wish to alter this about you.”

“Do men not build hearths? Do gods not keep forges? Do we not capture air within our lungs and receive the very gift of life? I call myself yours because that is what I wish to be. It is no punishment. Please…deny me this only if you must, and I will understand, but I will grieve for my place within your vault.”

“We gods are selfish. Too selfish by far. I fear your giving me this gift of you will bring you harm. In your soul, not your body. That I have already harmed beyond redemption.”

“No. _Absent need _for redemption. This, too, I give freely, and benefit immensely. It is an easy price, a little pain.”

“Ah, my love.”

“Am I?” Michael swallows. “Your love?”

“You could not be anything else. You say I have not given you a cause in weeks. It is because I don’t wish us to be parted any longer. Are we not permitted this?” He gestures around at the temple, open and airy, yet somehow private, a world that exists just for them, full of comforts and safety. “You have proven yourself to me. Any debt that may have been is no more. If that means you leave my service…then so it is. But I hope you will stay.”

“Always. _Always. _See, you need not say I am yours, for I will say it enough for both of us.”

“Perhaps I will say it. You are mine.”

“Say it again.”

“Mine, Michael.”

It is a breeze that pulls the curtains close around them, the god will say with his placid smile as he strips Michael bare and wraps him in his arms.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw for blood/blood drinking this chapter

Alexander has three brothers, gods of fire all. They come to Michael one by one, when the weather grows cold and Alexander, still young for his kind, retreats from the world to preserve his strength.

The first brother comes to him when he is in the garden, harvesting the last of the autumn crop before the days grow dark and the soil cold and stiff.

“Our brother you bring gifts, make offerings,” the first brother says, looking at Michael like so much kindling. “Why honor him, when other gods are fiercer? Pledge yourself to me, and your enemies will perish in their beds, the very breath stolen from their lungs.”

“I have no need for strength beyond that which my god grants me,” Michael declares, and he bends over the weary old leaves of his vegetable garden, though he knows one should never turn his back on a god.

The second brother comes to him when he is in the bedroom, washing himself before bed. The cold water in his basin, dripping from his curls, turns so hot it blisters when it falls onto his skin.

“Our brother makes you his champion,” the second brother says. “Why honor him, when other gods are more rewarding? Pledge yourself to me, and you will win yourself nations—castles and women and gold, all yours for the taking.”

“Your brother’s favor is my greatest reward,” Michael declares, and crosses the room to open the window and welcome the icy wind into his home, though he knows one should never risk incurring the wrath of a god.

The third brother comes to him when he is on the road returning from market, heavy basket on his back and snow soaking through his boots.

“Our brother claims to keep you and protect you from harm,” the third brother says, “And yet here I am, unmolested, with naught but flesh between your beating heart and my fist. Why honor him, when other gods are stronger? Pledge yourself to me, and you need never fear death.”

“I already have no fear,” Michael declares, “As I believe the two of us both know that any harm you visit upon me will be turned back upon you a thousand-fold once your brother discovers what you’ve done.” And his hand falls to the hilt of Alexander’s sword, though he knows one should never bare steel to threaten a god.

The season wears on, harsh and hungry, and Michael receives no more uninvited guests, neither in the form of gods nor men. He spends the season hunting; he spends the season freezing. Winter did not used to get at him so—but now he is so used to the sun and the open sky of summer, and all the other things that summer brings.

He spends the winter wrapped in furs that summer gave him, whittling away white and silver days among the hardy sprigs of heather shivering out their season, sweeping snow from the temple steps.

Then the last frost breaks, and he blooms under the equinox. Green new leaves take their first breaths, new life takes its first steps, and Alexander does the same, to find Michael sleeping at the mouth of his altar, all wrapped in sunlight.

He gets more golden by the year.

Alexander crouches beside him, buries his fingers in the tender new grass. Michael looks new and tender, too, with Alexander’s own light twined through his hair, around his body, from throat to thigh. Though young himself, and still weakened from the long winter, Alexander feels so, so old.

He sits beside his lover and prepares a sacrifice of his own.

First, a sturdy twine of new stems and winter bark and lyre string woven by his own fingers, which can grow to any length as long as it is watered, and which will never break as long as the Earth is blooming. He binds it around Michael’s ankle and seals it with a kiss.

Second, he takes up Michael’s sword. His finest work, the first blessing he gave his champion, but it was forged with one unconscionable flaw. So he pulls from his purse one of Michael’s own knives, retrieved from his kitchen on Alexander’s journey here.

A god’s sword can pierce all, any mortal, any target that the god so pleased—all but the god himself. And for Michael, for his safety, that will not, cannot stand. So he takes the knife, holds it to his lips, and whispers into it a blessing all his kind would call the vilest folly.

Third, he lays this body he wears to welcome worshippers, to be with Michael, on the soft grass beside him. They cannot touch like this. In fact, every time they have touched in the human way, it has been at a cost.

That has always been his way. All gods require a price, and when it was Alexander’s time to choose his currency, he picked what seemed simplest, and all his life has borne that choice out so far. Blood requires no great trade in pain, only a small one, gone in mere moments even to the short life of a human. He has kin who ask for greater gifts--not just blood, but flesh and bone--but Alexander knows his favors are not so dire as all that. And unlike other gifts, secrets or memories or carnal acts, blood requires no culling of the mind or soul in addition to the body. And besides—Alexander has liked it, this payment he receives, the way it wells up from within the body, the way it shines so red and glistens in the firelight, even, at times, the way it tastes upon this tongue, rich and heady and hot.

Gods’ blood is none of those things. It is a thin and bitter thing. Alexander hopes his love will forgive him when he wakes.

Michael has paid his price so many times, so much so that Alexander trembles every time he touches his fingers together and does not find Michael’s coin between them. Just as it is wrong, so vastly wrong, that there will come a day when Alexander spends a season away, and when he points his head back home, Michael will be dead and gone.

He reaches for the knife he left at Michael’s hand. He cuts his palm and sucks until his own blood fills his mouth. He tips Michael’s chin up into a kiss.

And he sits a while, there on the hillside beside his altar, and he listens to the birdsong, lifts the air beneath those wings. He listens to the air lift Michael’s chest and is at peace.

Michael stirs. His lashes drift like gold dust on his cheeks, and when he opens his eyes he gazes at Alexander with two bright, precious coins.

“You’re here,” he says breathlessly. “Are you not still weak? I was willing to wait…”

Alexander shrugs and lays his cheek on his knees to better gaze at Michael.

“Is that not why we gods have champions?”

Recently, it has been so that Michael does not even pray or ask permission before he finds whatever edge lies around him and pricks his finger to pay the price.

The touch of his body is better than sunrise on the first of spring, better than a bonfire at midsummer.

After they have sated themselves on each other, Michael lays upon his chest. With closed eyes and a head full of Alexander’s heartbeat, he murmurs:

“Earlier…when I was asleep…I had the strangest dreams.”

And Alexander smiles. Though the season has changed, cold winds blow from the north.

“Oh, my heart,” he says, “I know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hope yall like Lore Stuff :0 plus a glimpse into god!alex's head


End file.
